In a standard winding or rewinding machine a web, normally of paper or cardboard some 5 m or more wide, is longitudinally slit into a plurality of strips that are fed to adjacent coaxial cores on which they are simultaneously wound. As described in German patent 1,229,361 of Moser, German patent document 3,207,461, German patent document 3,811,871 of Dropczynski, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,222,679 also of Dropczynski, the rolls being wound are supported in an upwardly open cradle formed by a pair of driven support rollers. Once the rolls have the desired diameter the finished rolls are removed from the winding cradle and then typically marked or wrapped for transport to the end user.
The difficulty in this last operation is that the rolls are wound up immediately adjacent each other, as the incoming web is slit immediately upstream and it is impossible to significantly separate the strips from each other. Thus the rolls effectively abut one another and must be separated so that they can be marked, wrapped, and handled. This is a laborious operation as such rolls can be more than 1 m in length and diameter and can weigh several tons each. The machines provided for separating the rolls to expose their ends and, frequently, unstick them from one another are bulky and complex.